The Art of SEO with Stephan Spencer

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Ann Morrissey: Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Ann, and in today’s episode, we’re sitting down with Stephan Spencer, who wrote The Art of SEO. Stephan kicks off the episode by going into why SEO is still as important as ever, even with the rise of AI. While AI may shift how we search, he assures listeners that SEO remains the backbone of the internet. So you should stay focused on your SEO goals, keep investing in strategies that work, and adapt to the evolving world of search. You’ll also hear him talk about the power of experimentation, why you shouldn’t be afraid to test out different tactics on your site, and how tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics can help you refine your strategy. Lastly, you’ll learn about the importance of creating content that resonates with your audience. Google rewards authentic, helpful content, so the more personal and valuable your content is, the better it’ll perform in search. Before we dive into this week’s episode, I wanted to take a moment to let you know that our Cyber Monday sale is currently live, and you can join Food Blogger Pro for a hundred dollars off of your annual plan. Plus, you’ll receive a copy of our brand new SEO workbook that we just cooked up for you. This offer is only available if you enroll before Wednesday, December 4th at 11:59 PM Eastern Time, 10:59 PM Central Time. So be sure to visit the link in our show notes or go to food blogger pro.com/cyber-monday–2024 to take advantage of our biggest sale of the year. And now, without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Stephan, welcome to the podcast.

Stephan Spencer: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: I was on the other side of the microphone not too long ago having a conversation for your Marketing Speak podcast, and one of the things we were talking about as we got into it was SEO. And I said this phrase that I say on this podcast occasionally, I said, it’s like an art and a science. And you’re like, oh, have you read my book by chance? It’s called The Art of SEO. And I was like, oh my gosh, that’s so perfect. So you have been in the world of online business building, SEO specifically for a really long time. Talk to me about that title, The Art of SEO. Why did you come up with that and does that still feel true today?

Stephan Spencer: Yeah, well, I can’t take credit for the title that preceded me actually. There was a series from O’Reilly, the Art of Project Management and so forth. So the Art of Series was a top-selling series for O’Reilly.

Bjork Ostrom: O’Reilly being kind of these technical books that cover all sorts of different topics.

Stephan Spencer: Yes, I’ve been a fan of O’Reilly, the publisher and Tim O’Reilly the founder since the nineties. Since the early nineties. I actually learned Pearl how to program and build websites in 1994 and make them interactive using database calls and all that using Pearl from an O’Reilly book 1994. So I really loved and appreciated that publisher. I never would’ve dreamed that I would be an O’Reilly author, three time O’Reilly author back when I first picked one up and used it to learn how to build something. And so the Art of War is actually, I think, the original inspiration for O’Reilly’s Art of Series. But are you familiar with the Art of War by Sun Tzu?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, the Art of War. And then the other one that we actually talk about a lot is the War of Art. Do you know Steven Pressfield?

Stephan Spencer: I don’t know him, but I’ve heard wonderful things about his book. I know the book. Yeah. So The Art of War has this amazing quote that I love to share, and that is Tactics without Strategy is the noise before defeat. And I believe that applies to SEO, not just to warfare and all of marketing, really. So if you think about all the tactical stuff that people are so focused on with regards to SEO, what the latest Helpful Content Update musings are and the biggest winners and losers in the last core update and so forth, it’s so tactical that you get lost in the weeds, and that’s where you get slaughtered on the battlefield to mix metaphors. And I really want people to zoom out and think bigger picture because one SEO isn’t going away anytime soon because what’s one of the most popular websites on the planet? Google? And what’s the primary driver of Google traffic? Is it paid? Is it AI overviews or is it organic? It’s still organic and will be for quite some time. So these naysayers who say that SEO is dead and have said it over the years, and now the reason supposedly is AI, they’re off, they’re way off the mark. So keep investing in SEO, trust that everything is unfolding as it’s meant to, like divinely orchestrated, and just relax and make your site better for users. And for SEO, and I’ve seen a lot over these decades, I’ve been in the SEO game with I am building SEO into websites from the nineties. I actually started doing SEO before Google existed. And it’s some of the tried and true best practices foundational principles of creating a crawler-friendly website that functions and works and has all the proper redirects when needed and the robust text directives as needed and has quality content that’s not too small and not overly keyword dense just for SEO purposes and has relevant keywords in the title tags and all that sort of stuff is foundational and has been since the nineties. Why would we veer away from that? Because a lot of users are on ChatGPT now, they’re not getting the same level of quality of the response if they’re trying to do a search query, even with Search GPT, it doesn’t hold a candle to Google search. Now, there are some naysayers who hate on Google and its algorithm because it seems to have gotten less relevant as years have gone on. But the fact of the matter is it is most people’s go-to source when they’re searching for information on the internet. So I think we just all need to double down on doing stuff that is future proofing our website from an SEO perspective and trust that we’re not going to have the apple cart upset anytime soon.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So one of the things I love about that is I think sometimes for any creator they can get, let’s say, well early stages or people who have been doing it for a long time, you can get into it and you can start to get surrounded by like, Hey, what’s the best host? And that’s really good. You should be aware of that. It’s like, what’s the best way to structure a post? You should be thinking about that or what’s, how can I be using Google Search Console? Those are all really great, but to your point, and maybe the analogy could be when you talk about the art of something, we often talk about the world of music, and you could have the most expensive guitar with the best strings, with the best amplifier, and you could be on the world’s most beautiful stage. But if you’re not like a musician who’s trained for 10 years in playing guitar, it’s probably not going to sound good. And I feel like because we are in a world that’s technical, it can sometimes feel like, Hey, if we get all of these tactics right, then we’re going to be successful with our craft. And I think both need to exist. But the thing that is most important more than tactics is the art of it. Are you crafting a thing that people respond to, and then after you’ve played guitar for a decade and you get really good, you can think about the best strings, you can think about the most expensive guitar, you can think about the best amplifier. Those things are still very much so important, the tactics. But what really matters is the craft. But I think what’s hard is the craft is ambiguous. And so for people who want to get better at the art side of SEO, what does that look like? How do you get good at the craft of content that Google wants to rank? Not because the tactics are right, but because the content is so good that they want to prioritize that in a search result.

Stephan Spencer: Now, this dovetails very nicely with what we were talking about, tactics versus strategy, and that quote from the Art of War. I have one more quote I want to share with you that I think also frames this quite well. I learned this or heard this from Tony Robbins, and that is to be outcome-focused, not activity-focused.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Stephan Spencer: Yeah. So if you’re outcome-focused, you have the big picture in mind where you’re heading and whether these things will actually move the needle or not, you can tick the box off a whole bunch of best practice checklists for SEO and end up wasting a ton of time and not moving the needle hardly at all. So just really an important way to frame this whole conversation. So you’re talking about this ambiguous craft of SEO or what some people would actually call a black art. You’re just trying to reverse engineer this black box called the Google algorithm, and that even Google engineers don’t understand anymore because they’ve let AI take over and use machine learning to come up with its own criteria what Google engineers refer to as signals, right? These are ranking factors, and even Google engineers don’t know what those ranking factors are. So the SEO community has a better handle on it than Google engineers because we like to try and reverse engineer poke and prod at that black box called Google and see what works and what doesn’t work, and try and discern correlation and causation from each other. And so if you really want to focus on the biggest needle movers, the ones that are going to get you the outcome, you need to be willing to experiment and not just read what on the SEO blogs and even in the legit highly rated books such as mine, the Art of SEO, you cannot just take that at face value and assume it’s all exactly true. You have to test this stuff for yourself. Your mileage may vary as they say, right? So if you look at this kind of like an experiment or a set of experiments, then you can try something and see if it works and then revert back if you need to or try another experiment. Let’s just take something so basic as title tags. This is a really important element, has been since the beginning. Probably the most important element from an on-page factor standpoint, stuff on the page, you change the title tag and you’ll change your rankings almost certainly. So it could go the wrong direction or it could go the way that you want it, and if it goes the wrong direction, it’s not the end of the world. You just course correct. You treat this as iterative experiments to see what works and what doesn’t work. If you’re afraid to change your site because you have that coveted ranking for whatever coveted keyword, now you’ve backed yourself into a corner and you can’t make changes because you’re afraid you’re going to lose your rankings, and operating out of fear is never a good thing. So just be willing to be experimental with this. Try things that are going to be really easy to back out of and that don’t require a lot of technical acumen, like optimizing your title tags. And that’s something that you can use like a WordPress plugin that allows you to mass edit these and not just do them one at a time inside of the WordPress page and post editor. That’s not the smart way to do it.

Bjork Ostrom: If you have hundreds or thousands of pages, that would take you a very long time. So one of the things I imagine in that scenario is you do have a post that’s ranking well, and usually for us, we would say, Hey, if we’re going to experiment with something, we’re going to take a piece of content that we have that’s kind of doing well. It’s like it’s getting a decent amount of traffic enough where we can experiment and track it, but it’s maybe not position one for the most high traffic keyword that we have. We’re not going to go to that post. We’re going to go to one that’s maybe like, Hey, it’s position four or five and we’re going to tweak a few things and we’re going to see or tweak one thing. Usually it’s a better way to test and see what happens with that. An example, in our case, really easy example is like, Hey, we’re taking videos that are lower down on the page. We’re moving those up so people see those right away, and we’re just thinking that we want to do that across the board because we’re going to earn more from it if a video player is up and it starts sooner, but we want to see what impact does it have. So we do batch of five, batch of 10, kind of these mid-tier posts, then eventually scale up to the other ones once we feel comfortable with it. Do you have something that you’re using to track that with? Are you using Google Search Console? How do you know if it changes or you’re just looking in a search result? What’s the best way to know when you are experimenting to see the results of that?

Stephan Spencer: Well, you can use expensive tools to do SEO tests and probably our listener viewers not I’m spending that kind of money. Sure. So yeah, I would just recommend using tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and if you have at least one third-party tool for SEO, perhaps it’s A H Refs or Ahrefs as they call it, or SEMrush or Moz, probably the industry is more focused on refs as the top one, but regardless of, those are all really robust tool sets and they allow you to do keyword research and link research and competitive intelligence, all sorts of great stuff. So you can track rankings and improvements or decreases in link authority, and Ahrefs is referred to as DR domain rating and yeah, just URL rating, that’s on a page level basis. And then DR is domain-wide, and you track those metrics, you track the rankings and overall for the whole site, these are some metrics that I think are useful not just for your own site, but for any site that you’re trying to do a partnership with or even get a link from. You want to look at their organic traffic numbers and, of course, their DR score, the domain rating, and the number of keywords that they’re ranking for. So if a high DR site is willing to do a deal with you and do some co-marketing link build with you or send you some link equity, And they have great dr, but they have very little organic traffic according to Ahrefs and very few keywords that they’re actually ranking for in the top 10, that’d be a big red flag to avoid that partnership. That site probably is artificially propped up with a DR score in order to sell links.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Interesting.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s a world that we’ve never gotten into, but I know some people are really strategic about how do we partner with a brand, maybe you do a joint venture. I think about it even in the world of podcasts, like you’re on a podcast and somebody will link back all of that collectively is really so important. One other tool that I want to mention before we get too far away from it, we’ve used a tool called SEO testing, which actually just brings in Google Search Console data. And then what it does is you’re able to say like, Hey, at this point we made this change and it kind of does the calculations for you. So it’s still the same data, it’s not new data, but it just is helping you understand any changes that potentially happened because of the update that you made. It’s hard to know for sure, but one more thing I want to go back to that I think is worth pointing out. Number one, Tony Robbins, you had mentioned Tony, he has this great quote on your site. He says, I know Stephan, this man is a genius, the top guy in the SEO business, which is such a great quote to have from such an iconic guy. I even have the audio entrepreneur to verify,

Stephan Spencer: Hit the play button, and then

Bjork Ostrom: Hear his raspy voice. That’s so great. So you had talked about this idea of outcome over, what was the other word? Outcome over

Stephan Spencer: Outcome-focused instead of activity focused. Activity focused. And was, by the way, just to call back on something that you had mentioned really briefly there, you said SEO testing.com. There’s another platform that you should know about if you do have the budget to do legit SEO testing, searchpilot, searchpilot.com. And the founder or co-founder of that is Will Critchlow, who you may have heard his name before in the SEO community. He’s the former CEO of Distilled, or maybe he’s still the CEO there as well. It’s a big agency and he hosts the Search Love Conference for many years. So he is a fixture in the SEO community and he’s heading up this testing platform, which at one point was called Distilled ODN. So definitely worth checking out. It’s not inexpensive though. So if you don’t have budget for Ahrefs or SEM Rush, you almost certainly don’t have it for this testing platform.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. Even when I look at the pricing, it’s all custom quote, so you need to reach out in order to get numbers from them. So this American Express Black card to apply. Yeah, exactly. Totally. So this idea of outcome, I was thinking about it as it relates to the work that Lindsay and I do. So context for us, Lindsay and I started Pinch of Yum 14 years ago, primarily 99.9% of the content on Pinch of Yum is created by Lindsay. She’s the creator, she’s the recipe developer, she published his content to it. And one of the interesting things I’ve been reflecting on even in this conversation is one of the ways that we work together is Lindsay is very much so what I would consider to be outcome focused. And you can let me know if this kind of taps into what you’re talking about, where she’s thinking about how do people come to this piece of content? Are they going to make this content? Is the recipe going to be successful? Is it clear? Is it easy to understand? Does it flow well? And she’s thinking about how do we change and adjust and improve things to get a better outcome from the content? I’m spending 0.5% of my time thinking about that. I’m thinking about, Hey, how do we make the site a little bit faster? How do we work with our team to improve Core Web Vitals? How do we make sure that we have those foundational structured data elements included? And my belief is that’s kind of the easy part because there’s generally a playbook. You can follow that playbook around best practices. It’s technical, it’s kind of like there’s a right and wrong answer with the tactics, but the outcome is more of where the art comes from. It’s like how do you create a piece of content that people are successful with and get people to that content via social media or email or whatever it might be. Is that a little bit of what you’re getting at?

Stephan Spencer: Boy, there’s a lot to unpack here. So let’s say for example, that you’re trying to get in people’s heads to understand what they’re motivated by and what problem they’re trying to solve. I learned this acronym. The acronym is upside, but U-P-S-Y-D, Unaware, problem aware, solution Aware, your Solution aware, and then decision. So you think of people who are at various stages of the buyer journey, they will have a certain level of sophistication and knowledge about the solution and how to go about implementing it. So let’s say that somebody is on a recipe and they want to, I don’t know, improve on it and maybe utilize it in a restaurant. I’m just being hypothetical here, that’s a very different outcome than somebody who is a busy mom that only has time for maybe 15 minutes in the kitchen because she’s got a lot of demands on her time with her kids. So if somebody has a set of constraints and you have addressed those constraints in a meaningful way, then that’s going to provide the user with a lot of value that’ll make it more link-worthy, and thus she’ll get more links to that content. Appreciate that. Even if you’re not asking for links, they’ll just spontaneously link to it And it will almost certainly be picked up as kind of next level content by the latest AI algorithms inside of Google. And so you’ll be rewarded in multiple ways. Now, lemme give you kind of a similar sort of scenario, but one that I’m actually in the process of implementing with perhaps no direct SEO benefit, but I don’t care. I’m willing to almost bet the farm on this. And that is to take my personal development podcast. So you have marketing speak, my marketing show, which you are on. And then my Real Passion is actually a personal development podcast all about spirituality and mindset and biohacking and wellness and all that. So that’s called Get Yourself Optimized. And we just recently relaunched that site as of a week ago, beautiful new design designed by Studio One Design. I love those guys out of Australia. And so this new site going to have, our vision is for it to have every single episode have an online course based on the podcast. So based on that particular episode, we will use Claude Chat, PT 11 Labs, Nvidia io, all in combination to create a three module video-based online course that will have things like reflection questions and multiple choice quizzes and worksheets and checklists even perhaps. And all of that is done through AI with some just QA before and a lot of disclaimers because AI has hallucinations still. Anyway, so that’s the vision is for every single episode. So we’re in the process of ironing out all the kinks, and we have some of our early adopter guests saying, yes, I want to be part of this pilot. And they’re actually letting us use their voice and AI-generated version of the voice using 11 labs that you cannot tell is not them. It’s so cool. We’ve narrating their own course for few things.

Bjork Ostrom: What’s that? We’ve experimented with 11 labs just myself out of curiosity, and it’s like, oh, wow, this is amazing.

Stephan Spencer: Yeah, it is. It is. So imagine a faceless video. So it doesn’t have the face of, I don’t like using an AI avatar of somebody I know, HeyGen, is spookily good at this? HeyGen.com. But that feels too, I don’t know, uncanny valley to me and out of integrity or just kind of icky. So I’m not going there, but having the AI narration be the guest’s voice, I feel that that’s with their permission going to be something that’s cool and allowed. It’s not going to be weird. So imagine you as a guest, actually, you were on the other show, but imagine being a guest on this show and you get an email out of the blue saying, Hey, we created an online course. Here’s the video scripts, here’s the outline of the course. Here are the quiz questions and everything. Can you perhaps have a quick look at it and tell us if you like it and give us your blessing to move forward with implementing this? No charge to you. We just want to make our podcast website more of a learning destination and more active learning than just passive listening. And I guarantee you some folks are going to say, that is amazing. I want to work with you. Can I hire your agency? And maybe some will say, no, that feels too, I don’t know, weird or whatever for me. But then there’ll be others who are just kind of in the middle of the road. But the idea of this isn’t an SEO play because we’re not actually going to put the transcripts of those video scripts onto the website onto onto the page. What we’re doing is we’re adding to the show notes page that has the transcript for the episode, and then there’ll be a player with a picker for each module and access the quizzes and that. And that’s going to be a huge value add so that somebody, back to your point about going after the outcome that Wayne Gretzky quote about skating to where the puck is going to be. So we’re skating to where the puck is going to be. I don’t think anybody at this point, any podcaster has done this on mass. I don’t think this exists yet. We’ll be the pioneer in this area of taking a podcast episode and turning it into an online course like a full blown, multi-hour online course based on the podcast episode and doing it across a whole swath of these episodes. I have 470 some episodes already. So that’s a way to create something that’s really remarkable. And I’m using that term very deliberately because I love Seth Godin’s definition of remarkable. And that’s simply this worthy of remark. If you create something that is worthy of remark, you are really going to stand out. You’re going to be that purple cow that he talks about in his book, and that makes you link worthy, that makes you buzzworthy, that makes it something that would interest an AI algorithm that’s trying to discern who are the top movers and shakers in a particular space. So on the other end of the spectrum, you have folks who are just trying to stay up with the kind of old school SEO tactics, tactics. And that’s not going to really futureproof your business because you’ve got folks like me that are in your space that are thinking completely outside of the box, and they’re going to leap multiple levels above you in this video game.

Bjork Ostrom: So I love that idea. And the reason is because so much of what search is, you have these platforms, we’ll talk about Google and it’s a platform trying to figure out how do you get the thing to people that is most helpful. And there’s all of these different ways that they’re doing that links being an indicator that we often talk about. But links are really just a reflection of something that happens in normal life, which is people remarking on a thing. It’s remarkable. And to go back to the music example, 50 years ago you would have a musician who was remarkable. And so you have Jimi Hendrix. It’s like he is remarkable. And people talk about it, they share about it like links, but it’s like a analog version of that. And so when the web comes around, how do you know what is worth showing to people? Well, you look at what people are remarking on, what people are commenting on. Now, obviously there’s hundreds of other variables, thousands of other variables that go into it. But what it’s getting at is the core of what we are trying to do in the world of content, whether it be with SEO or Instagram or Pinterest, you are trying to create something that is remarkable worthy of remark, and you are doing it in a digital space. And then the question is from there, how are you going to choose to create a business out of it if that is your goal? If your goal is to produce revenue, you create remarkable content. And then you say, do we want to do affiliate? Do we want to do ads? Do we want to work with brands? Do we want to sell our own product? But it all starts with having something that is remarkable and things are remarkable for different ways, for different reasons. It could be because it’s super helpful, it could be because it’s super funny. It could be because it’s super inspiring. These are all of the different reasons why something might become remarkable. And so for people in the recipe world, one of the things that I think people get into it and feel add tension with is like, Hey, I created a recipe. I covered all of the things that I should from a tactic standpoint, and it’s still not working. Why is that? Well, is it remarkable? And that’s the question that you have to sit with. So I love that as an outcome of this discussion is just really a reflection around how can you create content that’s worthy of remark? What a great takeaway. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Member Kitchens. Imagine your kitchen. It’s more than just a place to cook. It’s where your creativity comes to life, to where you nourish your family, your friends and yourself with food and conversation. Now, imagine sharing that kitchen with the world. Imagine inviting people in to experience your unique flavors, your personal touch, your passion for food. At Member Kitchens, they believe that every food creator has a special kitchen to share, and their job is to help you swing the doors wide open. Their white-label meal planning platform is your virtual kitchen. It’s fully equipped with everything you need to showcase your recipes and brand, build a loyal community, and earn a sustainable income. As one customer said, recurring revenue is life-changing. Your kitchen will integrate with tools you already use like Zapier and WordPress, and it’s fully configurable putting you in complete control of your brand and your business, all in an easy to use interface, backed up with stellar one-on-one support. So if you’re ready to share your kitchen with the world, set up your own member kitchen, visit member kitchens.com today to learn more and start your free trial and use the code foodbloggerpro for 50% off your first two months of any plan.

Stephan Spencer: And speaking of remarking, people, remarking about your content, in SEO parlance, there’s the term unlinked mention. So if somebody’s talking about your brand like Pinch of Yum, and they’re not linking to you, which happens a lot, And I know it ticks people off, if they pay for a PR firm and they get all this press and very little of it actually links to your website, that’s very frustrating. But it’s still going to count. Maybe not as much, certainly not as much, but it’ll still count because these sophisticated AI algorithms are picking up those unlinked mentions and have been probably for years. So it’s not all is lost. But yeah, you got to put the user first and the outcome first, and then all the tactical stuff comes as maybe an afterthought or comes along for the ride. And I just want to give a case example. I don’t have a food blog myself, but I’m going to use somebody’s blog that I’ve mentioned to you before about her site. She’s just blown up. She used to work for me, she was my va, my virtual assistant over a decade ago, and her name is Carolyn Ketchum. She has been blogging about keto and providing free recipes, and now recipe books, multiple, multiple bestselling, I think six of ’em, keto baking books that have been really going gangbusters. But she gets over 2 million page views a month, two to 3 million page views a month, and she’s been at this for 12 years. I have a great case study episode about this on my Marketing Speak podcast. Yeah, so she was not an expert on SEO, even though she worked for me. She did not learn all the SEO ins and outs. This was not a tactical play about applying all the Google cheat sheet stuff. It was really about being of value and trusting that this is going to lead somewhere. And she makes so much money super successful at those things.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s amazing when you find something that you are passionate about, that you are good at, and that there’s a need in the marketplace for it. And I think of that in the world of keto. My guess is she understands it really well. She’s lived that story. She can help people who are going through it. It’s probably noteworthy because of those things, or remarkable you could say. And it’s in a world where there’s a lot of people who are interested in eating in that way. And so all of those things together can kind of create this collective wave. Plus, I’m sure she’s smart about tactics, layering on top of it to make sure she’s or is partnering with somebody who does implementing those best case scenarios. So it’s really cool to hear. We’ll link to her as well.

Stephan Spencer: Her site is all day I dream about Food, which is a brilliant name based on the Adidas brand. All I dream about sports.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Stephan Spencer: Now, I don’t want to poo-poo tactical stuff. Let me give you an example specific to you actually to Pinch of Yum. It’s really basic simple thing that you could implement. So you have under your recipe categories, vegan, okay? Now you don’t rank for vegan recipes. That page is highly optimized, it looks like for vegan recipes. It’s the beginning of the title tag. It’s in the H one headline, and there’s top-rated vegan recipes as a sub headline, vegan dinner recipes, vegan, Instant Pot recipes, easy vegan recipes, et cetera. Here’s where the tactics come in that really will get this page and the pages that you’re going to create from this discussion if you so choose.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, great

Stephan Spencer: It will really sing to the search engines for the keywords that you’re trying to target. So what I think a missed opportunity for you is those categories of subcategories of vegan recipes such as top rated and vegan dinner recipes and vegan instant pot recipes, easy vegan recipes. You’re not ranking for those. So you’re not only not on page one for vegan dinner recipes, not just vegan recipes, but vegan dinner recipes. You’re not on the first 100 results. You’re not on the first 10 pages for vegan dinner recipes. How do you do that? You create a page all about vegan dinner recipes. All you have right now is a section on your main category page of vegan. That’s like vegan dinner recipes and then a sentence. And then you have some featured vegan recipes that are dinner recipes in a carousel that it’s not a rotating carousel. I hate it when those auto-rotate, but it’s a carousel. So all the stuff that’s hidden by that carousel, anything that’s hidden, is going to get discounted by Google if it’s hidden in a tab or within a hamburger menu, or you have to hit the plus sign or whatever it is, down arrow to display the thing. Know that Google is not going to give it full credit because it’s not visible by default to the user. You only have what, four or five-ish recipes featured fully visible, and the rest are, you have to use the slider carousel thing to see those next ones. And what, there may be 20, 30, I don’t know. I didn’t keep going, but there’s a bunch. What if you made a separate page just for vegan dinner recipes That would sing to the search engines for the phrase vegan dinner recipes instead of just being almost like an afterthought as a little section on your main vegan category page. Same thing with easy vegan recipes and so forth. And then it gives you also the opportunity to blow out the page because you’re not just going to have this little stub of that carousel and a part of a page. You want to fill that up with lots of valuable stuff relating to that topic, whether it’s easy vegan recipes or vegan dinner recipes. And you’re going to maybe provide some context around why dinner is the most important meal of the day for vegans or whatever. So it’s kind of like we had Bed Bath and Beyond as a client for a while, and they had, one thing they did right on their site is they had these tips and little factoids and things. So you’d go into a section such as bedding, and then you’d go from bedding into a subcategory like sheets, and then there’s Egyptian cotton sheets and all this. And you look at Egyptian cotton sheets, now you’re in a sub subcategory. And it gives you all this detail about why Egyptian cotton, what’s the big deal about Egyptian cotton and explanations about things like thread count and why that matters and what are good thread counts? How do I be a savvy shopper for sheets and not just get just bottom of the line stuff? So you could do the same thing with Pinch of Yum. And vegans are passionate. The running joke about how do you tell if the person is a vegan?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, you don’t have to. They’ll tell you. They’ll just tell you. Same with CrossFit. How do you know if somebody does CrossFit? You don’t have to know. They’ll tell you. Yeah, exactly.

Stephan Spencer: That’s awesome. I’m vegetarian, by the way, but

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so you can make that joke.

Stephan Spencer: Yeah, totally. You see how simple tactical stuff can help you to show up for keywords that you may have thought you just gave up on years ago, But you didn’t have separate pages dedicated to those topics. And also when you have these topics and you only talk about that particular phrase that looks very surface level, it looks thin content. That’s the term that Google has come up with. Thin content doesn’t just mean it’s a small word. A 300 word article is obviously thin content word article that just keeps talking about the same thing over and over again related to the main keyword. So this is an example I give fairly often, so I’ll give it here. And that has nothing to do with food. And that is if you were talking about lawnmowers, and this whole page is about lawnmowers and it’s thousands of words, but you don’t talk about lawn care or yards or grass or clippings or horsepower or weed whacker or gardening or any of that, that looks pretty weird. It looks shallow, and that’s thin content of a different sort. So you want to create something that’s really high value and has what some SEOs refer to as LSI keywords, latent semantic index, and you don’t need to know what that is. It’s probably not even used anymore if it ever was by Google. But the concept is important. You don’t use those related keywords like grass and yards and lawn care and all that on a page all about lawnmowers. You missed the mark and you probably hit the potential spam button inside of Google. So try

Bjork Ostrom: To create that. It’s important to have a fully comprehensive piece of content that covers all of those different elements, which makes sense.

Stephan Spencer: Well, I’d say if you go to sit in that other chair, imagine yourself as the visitor And they have expectations that you’re going to cover that stuff, then it would be a miss. It would absolutely be a miss. So one example I like to share is coffeechronicler.com has this ultimate guide to the AeroPress. I don’t drink coffee. I could care less about it, but they go to such extreme depth on that, how to piece about everything, about cleaning it and slurry and all that to recipes to infographics, just so, so much dilution, et cetera. It’s all there in one place. Now, if it was called the Ultimate Guide to the AeroPress and it only provided recipes for the AeroPress, I’d be like, yeah, that’s a disappointment. So you have to get inside the visitor’s head and see what their expectations are based on why they’re coming to your page. And if you hit that mark, then you’re probably well on track.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. One quick question, just out of curiosity. We talk about those category pages, what you’re saying makes sense. If you go to Pinch of Yum and you look at vegan, it’s like it’s a kind of roll-up of all the different vegan recipes on Pinch of Yum. But to your point, we could have a subcategory under vegan that would be dinner recipes. Would you imagine that the hierarchy of that being pinchofyum.com/recipe/vegan/dinner, that’s how

Stephan Spencer: You could do it that way, but I wouldn’t be worried about getting the URL structure exactly right to the page.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah,

Stephan Spencer: It doesn’t really matter. It’s not a major signal. So we don’t want to get lost in the weeds of supposed best practices that don’t move the needle. That’s that activity focus. Again, instead of being outcome focused, that’s not a needle mover. So if you had vegan dinner recipes with dashes between each word, HTML or PHP or something, or slash sure that that’s search engine optimal, but if it’s a big project for you to do it that way and you prefer to have it as slash category slash slash recipe slash vegan slash dinner, great, That’s fine too. That’s not going to be a big difference maker if you have one versus the other, or even if it had a number for your category ID or something instead. Yeah, keywords in the URL are nice to have, but it’s not major. And so if you think about how can I best use, utilize my time here, the very best use of your time is to create something really remarkable. So if no one else is, I don’t know, making an interactive dinner picker game or something, and you that could be worthy of remark, that could maybe get you on, I dunno, podcasts or maybe even on TV appearances if it’s particularly remarkable, and especially if you time it so that it’s timely for those appearances. So if you’re, I have done some TV segments about being a foster kid, for example, and I timed it so that I did those TV appearances during National Foster Care month, the month of May. So it’s like, Hey, it’s National Foster Care month. And we have next up Stephan Spencer, who is a successful entrepreneur and author and a former foster kid talking about the three big lies that people believe about foster care and foster kids coming up next. So that is timely and relevant. And so if you have a timely hook, you have an emotional hook like, Hey, people care about foster kids and the foster care system, they want to hear about it. If you have that equivalent with what you’re creating, that’s amazing. If you hit all the technical, tactical stuff, but you missed the emotional hook or the timeliness of it, then you’re probably not going to get the results you’re after.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. I love that. One last thing that I’m curious to hear your reflections on, because I think a lot of people are in this head space right now. It sounds like you’re not super concerned about AI in the role of search optimization traffic going away. I think a lot people listening to the podcasts are nervous about that and nervous about, Hey, what happens if everybody uses chat gt? Which obviously that would be a huge shift there, but even as AI overviews rolls out, what if that becomes 50% of search results have AI overview? I know it’s something we think about that we’re concerned about, but it sounds like there’s not a huge level of concern for you from a search perspective. Is that true?

Stephan Spencer: It is not a concern for me. So maybe in the future we will have this dystopic world, but I believe in creating my own reality or co-creating it with God and believing in the most benevolent outcome coming to pass. So I don’t think we’re going to be slaves to our AI overlords. And somewhere in the middle there is AI usurping every opportunity for us to get free organic traffic. And I don’t think that’s common either.

Bjork Ostrom: And if it does, then people are going to stop letting these models train on their data, and then the outcome becomes worse. And so there is that. Yeah,

Stephan Spencer: So if you think about how would I best utilize ChatGPT or Claude or Llama or whatever, I’m going to ask a question and what then? That’s, that’s it. I’m done. No, I’m going to have a conversation. That’s why it’s called Chat. So if I’m chatting with, if I’m conversing with an AI, ultimately it’s going to get to the point where I don’t want to have that chat myself. I want my personal agent to be my representative and have that chat with whatever the large language model is so that personal agent I can entrust with things like my personal private health data and medical records, tax returns, financial records, all that sort of stuff, and say, Hey, keep this stuff locked up tight, but more about me than even my spouse does. Go and ask questions about this, that and the other thing of these LLMs and collect, collate and aggregate and curate and all those things, and come back to me with a final answer that’s coming. Certainly that’s coming, but there’s still going to be opportunities and needs for us to kind of get into the weeds. We’re not going to just make the biggest purchase decision of our life without doing our own due diligence. We’re just going to trust the personal agent who had a conversation with ChatGPT, and now we’re going to bet everything on red. No, we’re going to get involved if it’s an important, and so if you think about what’s likely to come to pass in the near term, it’s going to be more use of LLMs large language models for discovery and research and competitive intelligence and brainstorming and strategizing and things like that. It’s a great conversation starter, great conversation partner. But it’s not the same thing as, let’s say I’m searching for new, a new webcam, and I want the best webcam because I shoot a lot of video. It’s probably a CNET or one of these other sites that’s done a lot of testing. This algorithm, or let’s just call it a metric for now, that’s an acronym from Google. It’s called EEAT. Now, almost certainly Google has very effectively trained its machine learning algorithms on E-E-A-T. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authorit and trustworthiness. Now, show me an AI that has ever had experience with cooking a vegan dinner or basket weaving or scuba diving or representing itself in court, never any of those. So it won’t ever have that experience until it’s fully autonomous and dystopian future, hopefully a few years down the line. But in the near term, it’s not going to have the experience. And why was added to the EEAT because it started as expertise, authoritative and trustworthiness, EAT. And then Google years later said, Hey, you know what? There’s an actual another E that we need to add to this experience. Why? Because of AI. So if you’re mass generating a bunch of content that it can’t possibly have that experience of these topics, and yet you’re generating the content as if it does, you will be outed. The algorithm at Google will be very sophisticated at catching this sort of stuff. So much better than using an AI detector such as GPT Zero or something. It’s like, these are good, but they’re not great. Certainly, Google is great at it. They’re just not letting on that. They’re great at detecting this stuff. So you want to, again, just relax and take a breath and know that what you’re doing when you’re creating great content that’s remarkable and that it’s really helpful and that you really understand the motivations and the situation, the problems that your visitor is facing, then you’re dialed in to really set yourself up for success. Even if things change with algorithms and maybe even a new search engine out-competes Google at some point. I don’t see that coming anytime soon. I’m not concerned that Search GPT is going to take out Google. I don’t see it. I just don’t. Now, where LLM does come in handy is empowering you to do better SEO and more SEO if you didn’t have the time, the budget, and now you can use ChatGPT, you can use Claude, et cetera to create things like, I dunno, improve your XML site maps and write a first draft copy of some intro copy for each of your subcategory pages because you never did that before. That’s low-hanging fruit. You can definitely utilize chat. GPT and Claude are my favorites for helping you with some AI-assisted SEO tasks. Now, you can’t just trust that it’s all correct because it may hallucinate on you, and those are just boldfaced lies, essentially hallucinations. But you do the QA and the fact-checking and all that. Make sure that everything is copacetic before you launch it, but you can really multiply your potential impact by using ai. I love as a kind of

Bjork Ostrom: Assistant or companion to what you’re doing, not as the

Stephan Spencer: Replacement, right? As a facilitator, I love this quote. I think it’s from Mike Cannings, or maybe he got it from somewhere else. You won’t be replaced by an AI. You’ll be replaced by somebody who’s using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. That’s so great.

Stephan Spencer: Yeah. And another related quote, this one’s from Peter Diamandis. There’re going to be two kinds of businesses at the end of this decade businesses. One is businesses that are using AI at their core, and that includes even the local plumber and everything, and two businesses that are out of business

Bjork Ostrom: Because of the businesses that use AI. So it’s this reminder to us that as creators, as business owners, figure out how to use it because you need to be competitive. You need to be smart, you need to be efficient, but also to preserve that humanity in what you’re doing. And that being such a great balance, and I know you have this interesting balance that you strike with your, so as we close out, my guess is people would be interested in following along with what you’re doing, and you have both the get yourself optimized as well as Marketing Speak podcast. So talk a little bit about those and then shout out for where people can find you and we’ll wrap up. Yeah.

Stephan Spencer: Okay, awesome. So Get Yourself Optimized. It sounds like an SEO podcast, but that’s personal development, spirituality, biohacking and all that. So you can go to getyourselfoptimized.com for that one. And Marketing Speak is all things marketing, not just SEO. So things related to paid search and paid social and analytics and e-commerce, conversion optimization, all that. So that’s marketingspeak.com and all the transcripts. There’s checklists of takeaways, actionable takeaways. There’s a lot of great material there on those two sites. And then stephanspencer.com is my personal site that has a ton of SEO tips and best practices and training videos, all sorts of great research material. And of course, the book, the Art of SEO that I co-authored, published by O’Reilly, fourth edition. Don’t get the third edition. That’s like eight years old and a thousand pages instead of 770 pages.

Bjork Ostrom: Nice. We’ll link to it in the show notes. Stephan, thanks so much for coming on. Really fun to talk to you.

Stephan Spencer: Yep, likewise. Thank you.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there, Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team here. We hope you enjoy this episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Since we’re kicking off a new month, we wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what you can expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership this December. Later this week, we’ll be publishing a Coaching Call with Erica from the Food Blog. It’s a Flavorful Life. In this Coaching Call, Bjork and Erica discuss how to hire help and outsource work, how to get started on Google Search Console, strategies for dividing your time, the best conferences for food creators, and how to build a community of fellow food bloggers. Next up is our Live Q&A with the one and only Bjork Ostrom. For our last Live Q&A of the year, we thought it would be fun to host an AMA or an Ask Bjork anything. We’re excited to answer all of your blogging and business-related questions, from how to get started to monetization to all things strategy. We’re rounding out the month with a brand new course all about the Feast theme and plugin. Whether you’re looking to make the switch over to Feast or you’re looking for a refresher, we’ve got you covered in this upcoming course. It’s going to be a great month, and we really hope you can join us for some of these new pieces of content. If you are not yet a Food Blogger Pro member and would like to join us, just head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more about our membership and how you can join us on Food Blogger Pro. We’d love to have you, and we’ll see you back here next week for another podcast episode. Make it a great week.